littleyear

Been a while. Mostly because good bird blogging is hard work. But we’re off to Minnesota next week for about 10 days, so there should be some good action. There may be live blogging, too, since I’ll try it from my iPod, as I’m doing now. We shall see what we shall see. And maybe you will, too.

There’s a Green-breasted Mango in Beloit, Wisconsin, just over the Illinois border. This hummingbird’s home is in Central America, so such a bird out of water created a lot of racket on the bird lists. It seems that everybody — us included — went to check it out. The bird shows up a few times a day at the backyard feeders of a couple of adjacent houses. The homeowners whose feeder the bird seems to favor don’t mind a row of scopes pointing at their house as long as we stay behind the fence. They seem to get a kick out of the notoriety and even have a book for people to sign. So today we made our first visit.

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Today was my birthday, so we decided to go to Galena, Illinois and be tourists. It’s a historic town — home to U.S. Grant — but now it’s just full of crummy gift shops and middle-aged Viagra types riding Harleys. We didn’t do any birding, though, but we did make a quick dash across the Mississippi to say we’d been in Iowa. (Who wouldn’t?) We drove through the small, grim island town of Sebula and managed to see lots of Great Egrets roosting in the trees and wading in the water. And while I was keeping my eyes on the road, Pole got a quick glimpse of a Belted Kingfisher. So after ten minutes, she has an Iowa bird list twice as big as mine.

IBET, the Illinois birding email list, alerted us to the presence of an ORANGE BISHOP at Montrose Beach. It was there all right. All the way from Africa maybe? No, all the way from some moron who released it from its cage. Since it’s almost certainly an escape, we can’t claim it as a lifer, bitchin’ as it was. Apparently, the same poor fella showed up the last year or two, but he’s just a cipher in the birding community until he hooks up with some of his kind and starts a breeding flock. But what do we care if he counts? We’ve got the His Eminence the Northern Cardinal who is just as bitchin’ and outranks our foreign ecclesiastic to boot.

Today we took a trip up to Horicon Marsh in Wisconsin — our first of the year, I’m surprised to say. The Wisconsin email list reported two rarities, and we saw them both: a BLACK-NECKED STILT and an AMERICAN AVOCET. We hadn’t seen these birds since our trip to Texas last year, and it was a strange sight. Lucky for us, the birds also attracted two very good birders: Tom and Carol Sykes. Tom is the administrator of the WISB list that brought us up here. It was a hot day, and the Sykeses were able to get us two lifers: a WHITE-RUMPED SANDPIPER and a BAIRD’S SANDPIPER. They helped us navigate our binoculars through the dried-up mud using fish carcases as bearings. Best sighting of the day, though, might have been a LEAST WEASEL that dashed across the road in front of our car. Good day: two rarities, two lifers, and a weasel. But then a weasel day is always a good day.